My Weekend of Fun...and Muffins

The hubby is on his way home from the airport after a fun weekend getaway to the exciting state of Indiana. He will be quite jealous when he hears of all the dishwasher cleaning adventures I had while he was gone. Oh, yes. I have topped all of your weekend fun by spending two hours scouring the pieces to my dishwasher that had apparently been overtaken by some underwater urchin thingy. I actually screamed and threw the thing down when I pulled it out from the bottom of the dishwasher. I'm surprised I didn't have nightmares last night.

The good news is that it no longer looks like some unidentified creature is growing in the contraption that cleans the dishes we eat on. The bad news is it still looks quite yucky. But two hours of scrubbing is all my poor hands could take, even with gloves on. I am appalled that it was that bad, and even more appalled that I'm so done with it that I just put it back together the way it is.

Yep. He's gonna be sorry he missed that.

Fortunately for him, I spent all day today in the kitchen, but I came away with more than a not-quite-so-funky dishwasher. I whipped up some of our most common breakfast treats...muffins. In my house, they are considered healthy food. Of course, they do not come from a box, and I am sure to add some stuff that makes me feel better about feeding them to my family.

Today's concoction resulted from the half a can of pumpkin I had leftover after I made cream cheese-filled pumpkin cookies. I could share that recipe, but I cannot qualify it as healthy, though it does have my beloved pumpkin in it. I can qualify it as yummy, though.

So, the muffins. If you're interested, here's what I did:

Pumpkin Apple Muffins (adapted from this recipe)

(I know some of these amounts seem crazy. I used a 1/4 cup measuring cup for the measurements I give in eighths. The bonus of this recipe is that it helps you brush up on your math while making something yummy to eat.)

1 2/3 cups white whole wheat flour
1/3 cup sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ginger
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp cloves
(You can just use 2 tsp of pumpkin pie spice, if you have it, in place of the above four spices.)
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking powder (I always buy the aluminum free)
1 tsp baking soda
3/8 cup + 1 T milled flax seed

1/2 cup honey
3/8 cup coconut oil (or you could use butter or applesauce)
3 T water
1 large egg
1 cup canned pumpkin (I had a heaping cup, because that's just what was left in my can)
1 crisp apple, semi-peeled and chopped (you can peel or not peel according to your preference)

Topping: 3 T sugar, 1/2 tsp cinnamon, 1/4 tsp ginger, 1/8 tsp nutmeg, 1/8 tsp cloves.

Preheat oven to 350 and spray a muffin tin.

Mix the first ten ingredients together in a medium mixing bowl. In another bowl, stir together the melted (or semi-melted, in my case) coconut oil, water, egg, and pumpkin.

Stir the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients. It'll be thick, but you can do it!

Fold in the chopped apple.

Scoop into muffin tin, filling each cup about 2/3 full. Sprinkle with topping. Bake for 18-20 minutes. Remove from pan and cool on a rack.

I'll admit that I'm an overfiller. I like big, tall muffins. Don't judge me. Since I like to fill my cups all the way up, I only got 16 muffins out of this. When I put in the second batch, which doesn't fill up all my dirty muffin cups, I just respray the ones I'm going to use again, fill them with batter, and then fill the other cups 2/3 of the way with water to keep the cooked-on muffin residue from burning. Because who wants to chisel out bake-on muffin residue? I imagine it's better than cleaning out a nasty dishwasher, but still not my idea of fun.

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